The forested land within the nearly 6,200 acres burned by the Fourmile Fire in 2010 that had been treated to reduce wildfire risk did not appear to alter the fire's behavior, and, in some cases, burned more intensely than adjacent, untreated land, according to a final report on the Fourmile Fire released Wednesday by the U.S. Forest Service.

The report, which does not differ significantly from a draft version released last October, also addresses the weather conditions during the fire, the fire's behavior, the response by firefighting agencies and the effectiveness of mitigation around homes within the burn area.

The report took nearly two years to complete after being commissioned by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs.

"This year Colorado is experiencing one of the most severe fire seasons on record," Udall said in a news release. "The Fourmile Canyon Fire was in many ways similar to the fires that have threatened Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and other Colorado communities this year. The Fourmile Canyon Fire has many lessons for firefighters, homeowners and land managers. We need to learn from these past fires and work together to adopt a strong, balanced approach to forest management, which will help keep Coloradans safe."

In all, about 600 acres of land within the burn area had been treated -- through measures including thinning and removing lower branches of trees -- to mitigate wildfire risk in the seven years leading up to ignition of the Fourmile Fire on Labor Day 2010.

The majority of the fuel treatments were administered by the Colorado State Forest Service, and much of the work took place on private land. About 66 percent of the land burned by the Fourmile Fire is owned by private property owners. The Bureau of Land Management owns 23 percent, Boulder County owns 6 percent and the Forest Service owns 5 percent.

Most of the treatments in the Fourmile burn area were small and narrow -- only two were larger than 20 acres in size -- and that may have contributed to the fact that the fire, which was spotting up to a half-mile in front of the main blaze, appeared to easily breach the treated areas, according to the report.

The added intensity of the burn in some of the treated areas might also have been because, in some cases, the forestry waste from the thinning operations was still piled on the ground. And, in many instances, prescribed burns -- which would clear out the fuels that lay on the surface of the forest floor, including pine needles and small branches -- were not used.

A spotter plane and large slurry bomber pass over a burning home during the Fourmile Fire on Sept. 6, 2010.
(MARK LEFFINGWELL)

The findings point to the importance of finishing fuel treatments, including disposing the extra waste, and the importance of performing treatments on a large scale.

"Fires under these conditions are a landscape phenomenon and a landscape problem," said Mark Finney, a research forester at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, who worked on the report. "Fires will spread many miles from where they start and they will cover thousands or tens of thousands of acres. If you're going to design fuel treatment programs to try to mitigate that threat, you need to think on that scale."

Creating contiguous areas of fuel treatment in the area burned by the Fourmile Fire likely was complicated by the fact that much of the land that burned is owned privately with slivers of public land interspersed in between.

"In an area that's so fragmented in the ownership, how do you coordinate among neighboring properties and across the landscape?" Finney said. "That's really what it takes."

But the fact that the fuel treatments in the Fourmile Fire area appeared to be ineffective in altering fire behavior does not mean that all fuel treatments are ineffective, Finney said.

"Fuel treatments have a very clear benefit to fire severity and to changing fire behavior," he said. "It's absolutely clear from the research in general."

While fuel treatments were not effective in the Fourmile burn area, mitigation efforts around individual homes did make a difference in which homes burned and which homes remained standing, according to the report.

"(Homeowners) have a lot of power to change the behavior on their own property -- to change the property through their actions," Finney said. "That's a lesson from this fire and all the other ones."

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